Among the many fascinating articles and reviews in this double-issue of Fashion Theory, I would like to call attention in particular to Chukwuemeka Nwigwe’s “Fashioning Terror: The Boko Haram Dress Code and the Politics of Identity.” Based in northeast Nigeria, Boko Haram is most notorious internationally for the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This important article, drawing on oral interviews, a range of international publications, and Boko Haram videos, explores the role of clothing in the terrorist sect. Boko Haram goes far beyond conventional Islamic dress practices to adopt both identifiable jihadist combat uniforms and deliberately deceptive styles, including cross-dressing.
If there exists an iconic American style, it is unquestionably denim – and blue jeans, in particular. Yet the production of denim has mostly moved overseas and the fabrication of jeans has changed considerably. In her article “Cone Mills Denim: An Investigation into Fabrication, Tradition, and Quality,” Sonya Abrego explores how the White Oak mill in Greensboro, North Carolina took a page from Japanese manufacturers who had purchased vintage looms to make the kind of high-end denim that was no longer produced in most other American mills. This case study potentially carries implications for other “lost” clothing traditions.
Although craftsmanship tends to be associated today primarily with the haute couture, Maarit Aakko examines 11 small-scale labels that share an artisanal approach to fashion design and production. Her article Unfolding Artisanal Fashion” investigates the complex meaning of “artisanal fashion,” which is not a typical category like “mass manufactured clothing” or “ready to wear.” She suggests that it entails “skillful materiality” together with a certain philosophical approach and immaterial qualities or values. At a time when the fashion system is increasingly divided between huge luxury corporations and huge fast fashion companies, the idea of an alternative creative paradigm, such as the one described here, has a definite appeal.
In her article, “Fashioning Cultural Criticism: An Inquiry into Fashion Criticism and its Delay in Legitimation,” Francesca Granata interrogates the reasons why fashion criticism has lagged far behind the criticism of other types of popular culture, such as film or music. As she investigates whether this delay in legitimation is related to fashion’s association with femininity, Granata examines the work of a range of fashion critics, from Lois Long who wrote for The New Yorker in the 1920s to Amy Spindler, The New York Times’ first official fashion critic in the 1990s and Robin Givhan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her fashion criticism in The Washington Post.
“It would seem that the long-running debate as to the place of fashion in the museum is no longer relevant,” writes Harriette Richards in her review of Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern. This “hybrid” exhibition, held in 2017 at the Brooklyn Museum, included not only O’Keefe’s paintings and photographs of the artist by Steiglitz and others, but also clothing that she had worn. While one journalist found it “trivial” and “sexist” to feature the artist’s clothes, another wrote that “O’Keefe’s style was not ancillary to her genius but fundamental to it.” In her thoughtful and intelligent review, Richards argues that “considerable insight… may be gained from observing an artist’s clothes in conjunction with her art.” She analyses in detail the way garments, works of art, and photographs are juxtaposed to explore the artist’s self-fashioning. Richards also makes important comparisons between the O’Keefe exhibition and Appearances Can Be Deceiving: The Dress of Frieda Kahlo, an earlier exhibition held in Mexico City. For like Kahlo’s self portraits, photographs of O’Keefe have become highly influential in the visual imagery of the modern fashion world.
Until recently, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was conspicuous for not organizing an exhibition of fashion. This was peculiar, since “MoMA was perhaps the first major art museum in New York to dedicate an entire exhibition to contemporary clothing” -- Bernard Rudofsky’s 1944 exhibition, Are Clothes Modern? In addition, MoMA has “a well-established curatorial department for design and architecture.” The 2017 exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern? was therefore “accompanied by major expectations.” However, as Alex Esculapio observes in his review, “the curatorial strategy did not translate consistently,” and the exhibition was often “unfocused.” Even the politically loaded terms “fashion” and “modernity” remained inadequately analysed.
“Costumes espagnols entre ombre et lumière [Spanish Costumes between Darkness and Light], a Palais Galliera exhibition at Maison Victor Hugo, was the second in a series of three exhibitions in Paris devoted to Spanish dress, the other two on Balenciaga and Fortuny, respectively. In her review, Victoria de Lorenzo points out that this display of regional Spanish dress was organized in conjunction with Madrid’s Museo del Traje, “whose collections had been on the brink of being dismantled in 2010,” when it seemed that the regional or folk dress would be handed over to an ethnographic museum, while fashionable dress would go to a fashion museum. De Lorenzo writes: “In Costumes espagnols the anonymous craft of folk dress is portrayed as silent luxury, equal to the mastery of the couturier Cristobal Balenciaga… and… Mariano Fortuny.”
In addition to the exhibition reviews, this issue of Fashion Theory includes four book reviews. Elizabeth Wilson describes Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York by Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark as “a rich and ambitious survey of ‘everyday’ fashion – what men and women actually wore on the streets of great cities.” It is “a fascinating account,… rich in detail,” such as “An East End producer of fashion [who] prefers to visit New York to buy ‘line by line’ copies of Paris fashions as this turned out to be cheaper than going to Paris.”
Friends, Fashion and Fabulousness: The Making of an Australian Style by Sally Gray charts “the lives and creative legacy of four key figures in the Sydney fashion and art worlds.” As reviewer Danielle Whitfield points out, the book “benefits from the author’s intimacy with both the material and the protagonists” – Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Peter Tully, and David McDiarmid. “Gray has been able to marshall a remarkable number of primary materials,” from letters to interviews, contributing to our understanding of “Australian” style, with a focus on “a specifically ‘Sydney’ style, defined by its ‘humour, irony and proto-queer propositions’.”
“Donatella Barbieri’s book, Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body, will take a prominent place in the body of literature interrogating the function of costume in the performing arts,” writes reviewer Jennifer Gall. Focusing on theatre and dance, Barbieri does not address film or television costume. Her final chapter looks at the relationship between fashion and stage costume.
Shoes: The Meaning of Style by Elizabeth Semmelhack is not an exhibition catalogue, although the author is senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, and the book features many “beautiful color illustrations of shoes both old and new.” Instead, it explores the relationships between material objects and identities. There are chapters on sandals, boots, high heels, and sneakers. As reviewer Chris Hesselbein writes, “Semmelhack’s book is an excellent historical overview of the central role shoes play in the construction of individual identity and broader social structures and technological developments.”
Sincerely,
Valerie Steele